The business of a call center, also known as a customer center, is to provide rapid and efficient interaction between agents and customers (or prospective customers). Conventional customer center systems determine if agents are being productive and meeting customer center targets (called “adherence”) by tracking phone usage of agents. In addition to talking to a customer on the phone, such an agent usually spends time using a PC or workstation application that runs, for example, a customer relationship manager (CRM) and a customer account database, among others. The proficiency of an agent on these applications therefore impacts overall customer center productivity. However, conventional customer center systems do not utilize information about application usage when providing adherence information.
Today's customer centers often support various interaction methods and media, including phone, e-mail, video conferencing, and messaging applications. Customer center systems typically allow some or all of these interactions to be recorded. The recordings may be reviewed later for compliance with business or government regulations, or for quality assurance. These systems also allow a supervisor to monitor interactions, typically to determine if an agent is adhering to customer center policies.
In conventional customer center systems, the playback of recorded interactions and live monitoring of interactions occurs in an “interactions” application, sometimes known as a “contacts” application. A separate “schedule adherence” application is used to compare agents' scheduled activities with agents' actual activities and to provide information about adherence exceptions to the scheduled activities.